Ethical Educational Leadership Within Academic Plantations

• In Event: 34.066 - Program Directors for Social Equity: Eliminating Barriers to Opportunities and Success

Abstract

Purpose
This auto-ethnographic, reflective paper captures the complications, contradictions, and daily barriers to ethical leadership across the P-20 pipeline. With a dual focus on university-based K-12 school leadership preparation processes contrasted with experiences as a social justice-oriented, race-conscious faculty member and program administrator, this paper engages in poetic-informed, auto-ethnographic narratives to clarify the often toxic, anti-intellectual contexts that favor whiteness as administrative leadership approaches.
Theoretical Perspective
This paper employs a scholarly-practitioner lens, applying Freire’s notion of praxis to suggest that our voices as human beings employed by intellectual plantations are intentionally silenced through racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the general presumed academic norms that reinforce oppression while denying and devaluing intersectionalities, critical consciousness, and collaboration with non-academics (Freire, 1973; Patel, 2015).
Methodology
Through the use of critical writings and phenomenological reflection on such writings, the paper situates the role of faculty members as pseudo-intellectual holders of knowledge paid to enforce Mills’ (1997) notion of the racial contract. As Bell’s (1993) framing of the permanence of racism has increasingly influenced critical race research, the educational leadership field has largely avoided critical race theory at large (Capper, 2015), and instead focuses on strategies that maintain the status quo and largely ignore culturally responsive approaches (Fraise & Brooks, 2015).
Findings
The paper identifies three themes to maintaining an anti-colonial framework within both the field of educational leadership, and as a university faculty member, and includes: 1) Recognition of P-20 educational leadership as a collective effort to more effectively colonize students and adults alike; 2) Deep isolation and rejection of anti-colonial educators; and 3) Creating and sustaining life balance when everyday professionalism is a violent, emotionally abusive attack. These three points become survival strategies for faculty who adopt oppositional stances to the systemic perpetuation of educational leadership as a collective commitment to white subjectivities and ultimately, white power.
Significance
The author concludes by highlighting the importance of fostering an ethical, socially just compass, reinforced by those outside of academia, to model for those learning how to resist within oppressive educational institutions.

Author

• Christopher B. Knaus, University of Washington - Tacoma